My first tiny skirmish with the facts goes into the debit column. My voice falls ten full decibels. This has happened before.

“I don’t keep secrets,” she says now in a flat voice. “I suppose you do though.”

“Sometimes I do.” I lose nothing admitting that.

“And you lie about things, too.”

“Only if it’s completely necessary. Otherwise never.” (It is better than confiding.)

“And like lovin me, too, I guess?”

A sweet girl’s heart only speaks truths. Evil suddenly takes an unexpected rebuke. “You’re wrong there,” I say, and nothing could be truer.

“Humph,” she says. Her brow gathers over small prosecutorial eyes. “And I’m s’pose to believe that now, right? With you ram-maging around my things and smokin cigarettes and me dreaming away?”

“You don’t have to believe it for it to be true.” I put my elbows on my knees, honest-injun style.

“I hate a snake,” she says, looking coldly around at the ashtray beside her as if a dead snake were coiled right there. “I just swear I do. I stay way clear of ’em. Cause I seen plenty. Right? They’re not hard to recognize, either.” She cuts her eyes away at the door to the hall and sniffs a little mirthless laugh. “That was just a lie on me, wadn’t it?”

“The only way you’ll find that out, I guess, is just to stay put.” Out in the chilly streets I hear a police siren wail down the wide, dark avenue and drawl off into the traffic. Some poor soul is having it worse than I am.

“So what about getting married?” she says archly.

“That, too.”

She smirks her mouth into a look of disillusionment and shakes her head. She stubs out her cigarette carefully in the ashtray. She has seen this all before. Motel rooms. Two A.M. Strange sights. The sounds of strange cities and sirens. Lying boys out for the fun and a short trip home. Empty moments. The least of us has seen a hundred. It is no wonder mystery and its frail muted beauties have such a son-of-a-bitching hard time of it. They’re way outnumbered and ill-equipped in the best of times.

“Well-o-well,” she says and shrugs, hands down between her knees in a fated way.

But still, something has been won back, some aspirant tragedy averted. I am not even sure what it is, since evil still floods the room up to the cornices. The Lebanese woman I knew at Berkshire College would never have let this happen, no matter what I had done to provoke it, since she was steeled for such things by a life of Muslim disinterest.